A while back, I wrote about my experiences learning Chinese as an ABC, sharing the trials and errors I’ve made along the way.  What started as a personal chronicle picked up steam as I’ve gotten numerous inquiries about best practices and in particular about the Anki decks I’ve created and continue to use to reinforce character learning.

Vocabulary building, along with immersion, is one of the most important steps in taking learning Chinese from a duty to a pleasure.  As with most languages, a little goes a long way – by the time you have your first 500 characters under your belt, you can recognize over 75% of the characters you’ll see on a daily basis.  Kick that up to 1,000 and you’re pushing 90%.  And using spaced repetition decks with Anki is the most effective way I’ve found to make new vocabulary stick.

Please email me if you have any questions or run into any problems.  There’s a lot of us out there trying to brush up our language skills, for cultural as well as practical reasons.  So I hope that this resource can be useful for our little community of Chineselearners.

Grab a sample of the deck here to get started, and the full decks are available for purchase here!